A normative rendering of the Partition of 1947 has been entrenched so deeply as an antagonism between one political, religious, or national constituency versus another that it is considered to be the unassailable historical narrative, based on “facts,” in which the violence of 1947 can be explained, rationalized, and periodized. Such a periodization allows for the years that follow to be simply declared as the period of “decolonization” that could unfold as if untainted, unaffected by the reproduction of a founding violence. Instead, we write of partitions in the plural, as a forceful concept that continues to divide and dispossess, and which endures in celebrated architecture and design projects to this day—for example, in a current international exhibition on modernist architecture in South Asia that uses the term “Decolonization” in its title.1 Decolonization needs to be restituted from rote historical narratives and static exhibitions and instead brought to the sites of ongoing struggle.

  • 1. The Project of Independence: Architectures of Decolonization in South Asia, 1947–1985, Museum of Modern Art, 2022. The problem of "partitions" in the plural and across geographies is being taken up, moreover, in emerging studies: for example, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “From Partitions,” in Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2023); Safia Aidid, “Pan-Somali Dreams: Ethiopia, Greater Somalia, and the Somali Nationalist Imagination,” Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 2020; Hollyamber Kennedy, “Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder,” Grey Room 76 (Summer 2019): 58–97.
Refugee camp at Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi, September 1947.
Refugee camp at Humayun’s Tomb, Delhi, September 1947. © Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and Google Arts and Culture

As Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood in Delhi, became ground zero for a groundswell of protests in early 2020 against laws dividing the Indian citizenry (yet again) on the basis of religion, the violence of partitions erupted once more.1

 The forty-foot structure of a people’s refusal to submit to this violence—an iron and mesh map of delineated, post-Independence India—alerts us to a landscape of coalescing histories that are simultaneously inflected by architectures of protest, ruptures of nation-states, and the hyperproduction of borders.

During the years that a modernist architectural sensibility crystallized around the world, camps in South Asia were shaping imagined and actualized nations: incubating Tibet in Karnataka’s Bylakuppe enclave; Bangladesh in settlements of stacked concrete pipe sections in Calcutta’s Salt Lake; or the Tamil Eelam in the Sri Lankan jungles. Their logic, that of “partition,” is one of apartheid, which gives architectural form to the present. Yet if the dissenters in Shaheen Bagh are right, then the subcontinent has inscribed not only lines of control but practices for their contestation and traversal. It is upon this legacy of partitions that an architectural futurity continues to hinge.

  • 1. Seema Mustafa, ed., Shaheen Bagh and the Idea of India: Writings on a Movement for Justice, Liberty and Equality (New Delhi: Speaking Tiger Books, 2020); Sarover Zaidi and Samprati Pani, “If on a winter’s night, azadi…” in Of Migration, ed. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee (Canadian Centre for Architecture 2022), originally published on Chiragh Dilli (February 15, 2020); Chris Moffat, “#Afterlives: Shaheen Bagh and the Force of Foundation,” AllegraLab: Anthropology for Radical Optimism (May 2020).
Frontispiece
Frontispiece - Left: “Letter from Home III” (2004), a wood block and metal cut print by Zarina over a letter from her sister, notates a world her family was forced to evacuate, a decade after the Partition of India in 1947. © Zarina, courtesy of the artist. Right: A page from The Incomplete Thombu (2011) by Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan shows a floorplan of a house drawn by a mother whose son was killed when her home was occupied by the Indian Peace Keeping Force deployed in 1987 to end hostilities in Sri Lanka. Mechanical drawing in ink on trace paper over page with pencil sketch, Entry No. 35, commissioned and published by Raking Leaves (2012), courtesy of the artist.
  • Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi is an architectural historian at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her work centers African and South Asian questions of migration, archives, heritage politics, and feminist and colonial practices. She is writing the book manuscripts Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and Minnette de Silva and a Modern Architecture of the Past, and co-editing Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration (in the online platforms ABE, CCA, Aggregate, 2019-2022). She directs the Columbia University working group Insurgent Domesticities and works with the GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi.
  • Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is a twentieth century historian at Brown University, with a focus on decolonization, displacement, war, non-violence, the visual archive and contemporary art. She is the author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Columbia University Press, 2007) and a part of the Decolonial Initiative on Migration of Objects and People. Her recent writing includes “Towards a Radical Practice of History: When Can History Repair?” (Verso blog) and “Borderlanders: A Political Concept for Repair” (in Repair, Routledge, 2022), and is presently working on, amongst other things, a graphic novel with Sarnath Banerjee.